Even though it is blocked in China, Twitter still courts Chinese companies to buy ad space on its service, showcasing how more than 300 million people elsewhere in the world can still view their advertisements.
Twitter has recently made presentations to prospective Chinese clients in the sidelines of the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show Asia in Shanghai, Business Insider reports.
Twitter believes that this is the time where Chinese corporations are trying their best to be global—in fact, the government mandates them to do just that—and the social media company banks on that urge for the Chinese companies to buy ad space.
Twitter already works with Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone maker, Alibaba Group, an online shopping giant, Qingdao Haier and Air China. These companies see the benefits of Twitter for their companies even though the social media site is blocked in their own country.
Twitter collected $436 million in first-quarter revenue from advertisers who paid to inject their ads, known as "promoted tweets," into Twitter users' timelines. The company has 302 million users worldwide, according to Fortune.
"We've tried lots of different ways to advertise to overseas customers but at the moment we're focused on using Twitter, Google and Facebook. The reason is because you know these users are real users, active users, not zombie users," Liu Dongchuan, director of advertising at Boyaa, a Hong Kong-based online game developer that began advertising on Twitter in August of last year, told News Hour.
